Poor performing applications hit manufacturers’ revenue

They said half of manufacturers have suffered unplanned critical application performance problems in the last 12 months with 83% reporting a rise in IT complexity driven by more users, increased locations, new applications and adoption of cloud computing. A third of manufacturers said that 'application downtime' was on the rise compared to just 20% of firms that have seen a reduction in application downtime over the past 12 months. Ipanema Technologies said: "IT leaders at manufacturing firms are in agreement that application performance remains critical to their bottom line, as research suggests poorly performing IT applications result in an average reduction in overall revenue of 20%." Common business problems caused by poorly functioning IT systems over the past 12 months have included: products being shipped late (42%), lower employee productivity (42%) and customer complaints (38%). Most (87%) IT leaders agree that guaranteeing application performance is a priority, but only 27% have confidence in their company's ability to rollout new applications quickly and easily. A large majority (70%) of firms said they did not have confidence in the ability of their firm to troubleshoot application performance problems when things do go wrong. Béatrice Piquer-Durand, vice-president marketing at Ipanema Technologies, said: "Manufacturing firms are facing a perfect storm of IT challenges. The business is asking CIOs to do more with less while demanding the benefits offered by new advanced applications like unified communications and video conferencing, which can be transformative for collaborative product design. "Our research shows that as IT estates become more complex, application performance problems are on the rise and this is costing manufacturers."